Spotify now available to everyone in the UK

We’re taking our first baby step to open up Spotify to a larger audience today. Up until now we’ve kept a close eye on controlling our user growth with invitations so that we don’t run into any problems and to ensure that everyone gets a really good music experience when they signup, so far so good.

So starting today people in the UK will no longer need an invitation to join Spotify, you can register for our free service directly from our website as always our premium, ad-free service is still available. However, we want to make sure that everyone who uses Spotify gets the same fast, uninterrupted experience so providing a stable service is our priority. If growth happens too fast and it starts affecting quality we may have to re-instate the invitation system, hopefully this won’t happen.

If everything goes well we hope to do the same in other countries in the future, but for now if you’re in the UK and have been looking for an invitation to join, the wait is over. Visit our homepage and join Spotify.

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It’s great that you’re doing this but at the same time a little but sad that Sweden (Spotify’s home country) is not the first country to be opened up.

Just guessing, but is the choice of U.K. based on the fact that they have the biggest selection of music and the least number of regional restrictions? Therefore the new users that sign up are less likely to be annoyed by searching for and finding content that they cannot play.

Is another reason why Spotify is not being ‘opened up’ in Sweden yet that you guys have commercial agreements with a number of partners in the Swedish market which permit them to give their customers free Spotify invites as some sort of incentive?

I notice Bredbandsbolaget’s current campaign runs till Easter… is that a clue to the timescales for opening up in Sweden?🙂

Amazing! Thanks very much for that.. I’m using the free version and can live with the ads. What I like(?) about the ads so far is that they are relevant to the UK, so I’m not bombarded with American car insurance ads which I’ll obviously never use! I have only one criticism right now: I need to find a way to stop Outlook removing the “unsafe” attachments if I email a track URI. It works fine on Googlemail but I think a lot of Outlook users will have problems initially..

Today I found out about Spotify from a large article in the Guardian newspaper. I can’t believe the quality of the service or product or however you want to describe it.
I just listened to the whole of the new Lily Allen “disc” and bought a copy off Amazon.
Finally: radio without infantile banter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Checked this out last night, had a few issues, streaming very slowly, buffering most of the time. Using it today however, and its fantastic! Very fast, just like having it on my hard drive. Being able to listen to the same track again and again with full control over where to play the track from/the ability to skim back and forth on a track as simply astonishing, you must have had plenty of licensing headaches! Limited library but i imagine this will improve over time and i can still find plenty to listen to. Relevant UK adverts to boot!

Unable to register for your free service after seeing the details in the Sunday Times. Its disappointing but presumably the response has been to great to handle. it would be a good idea to make this clear on your home page.

I did manage to register following the sunday times article. Am impressed by how easy it is to search. An interesting alternative is provided by an american radio station which allows on demand playing but with it’s own library restrictions is krth101.com

Genius! I was really upset at the loss of Pandora to non-US residents a while back. Spotify not only fills the gap, but is so much better! Streaming is flawless even on my 11Mbps wireless connection, as good as music from my NAS.
The adverts are infrequent and relevant too!
So, one question – any plans to introduce a feature like Pandora had to find tracks similar to one you search for? That would be the icing on the cake for this incredible service!
What about negotiating with ISP’s to provide premium services to their customers as part of their subscription?
So much potential! AMAZING!!!

Joined today – looks promising. I was pleased to see some content from Lifehouse, but choice of UK music is limited at-present. There also seems to be some confusion regarding genre – I listen to a wide range of music from hard rock to classical/choral and this does have some titles, but ‘Folk’ is poor, especially with regard to UK artists. No Dick Gaughan, Brian McNeill, Phamie Gow etc. The search came up with ‘Mark Knopfler’, ‘Cher’ and ‘Springsteen’ amongst others……not quite what I had in mind. Searching ‘Celtic’ was a little more productive, but the emphasis seems to be on the more commercialised sounds of ‘Enya’ and light on the leading figures in more traditional Scottish music other than Runrig.

Thank you! This is just great. A chance to listen to some old favourites and discover new music too. My list of CD’s to buy has just increased but at least I know that when I spend I shall not be disappointed! By the way I learnt about this from The Observer’s Sunday Music Magazine. Fantastic service, useful adverts (Find Any Film was a handy link). Once again thank you this has really helped!

Nice work! The program works just as you’d expect, it’s really nice to use. I’m also surprised at the small number of ads which play on the free version. How do you support the bandwidth with so few ads? Is it mostly handled by the p2p technology?

First the good parts. It’s a great service, the quality is good and the mechanics of the search work well.

Sadly though, there simply isn’t anything I like on it. I’ve never been a big fan of chart music and all I’m interested these days is techno, electro, deep house, breaks, some trance and a whole bunch on other non vocal music of which unsurprisingly perhaps is pretty non-existent on Spotify.

Spotify does not dig very deep at all. Sure there’s a few obvious tunes that managed to chart but for the most part, tunes that chart tend to be watered down versions of the real thing so are usually of less interest to me.

I really hope Spotify go from strength to strength and builds on the less commercial genres (whatever they may be) but until that happens I’ll only be logging in once a month or so to keep an eye on things.

i think that spotify is great formlistening for all types of music, but the problem is rihanna’s new song russian roulette is only avalible to people who have spotify premium which i think is really sad.
also my cousin wants an account and she can’t get one without an invite which i don’t unterstand!!
also try less of the commercial adverts because they get on my nerves i mean, after my song plays it cums 2 my fave song and i have to wait and it drives me insane coz i have no patience wat so eva

[…] “We’re taking our first baby step to open up Spotify to a larger audience today. Up until now we’ve kept a close eye on controlling our user growth with invitations so that we don’t run into any problems and to ensure that everyone gets a really good music experience when they signup, so far so good.” [12] […]